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Star Man posted:Does anyone have any juicy sources on archaeoastronomy? I can produce a short book named, "Archaeoastronomy." Like previous articles, this is downloaded by proxy, please nobody try and dox me from the IP address at the bottom of this pdf
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# ? Jan 17, 2024 23:15 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 11:52 |
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If magic isn't real then why does my garlic keep away witches? If magic wasn't real then surely a witch would've shrunk down through my key hole and stolen my blood for her ointment several times over.
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# ? Jan 17, 2024 23:29 |
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Nobody really thinks magic isn't real, FreudianSlippers. Don't worry.
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# ? Jan 17, 2024 23:31 |
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Thank god(s?). This Sator square wasn't for naught then.
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# ? Jan 17, 2024 23:34 |
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We'll never know how many elves are nearby now that we all own iron teaspoons.
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 00:22 |
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I can produce a short book named, "Archaeoastronomy." oh gently caress there's a distinction between archaeoastronomy and astroarchaeology
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 00:23 |
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Star Man posted:oh gently caress there's a distinction between archaeoastronomy and astroarchaeology More words need "aeoa" in the middle.
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 02:57 |
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bob dobbs is dead posted:thats some orthodoxy poo poo speaking. that wasn't a serious factor for mass religion until the 1500s AD. religion was sanctioned magic until they figured out magic doesn't exist The idea of magic and religion being separate things is really very new on the global scale. On top of lot of what once might have been regularly considered magic being rolled up into 'science', the idea of a 'secular' user of magic who practices world-changing arts without making bargains with, paying homage to or at least chatting with supernatural entities providing the actual power and knowledge is for the most part pretty new, though the ancient Greeks apparently had a similar idea. (Unfortunately rolled up a bit with ideas of medicine. Medicine being treated scientifically is also a rather relatively new idea in too many places, and it explains a lot about things like infant mortality) Even now, a lot of religious fundamentalists will treat other religions as being somehow magical and able to intangibly influence them just by existing unless they're treated with hostility.
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 08:43 |
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:The line Nessus refers to is Genesis 3:22 Presumably not the accepted Jewish or indeed Muslim explanation, how do they handle it?
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 10:53 |
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feedmegin posted:Presumably not the accepted Jewish or indeed Muslim explanation, how do they handle it? I don't know as much about Jewish or Muslim views on the Old Testament as I do Christian, having grown up in the latter environment. I have assumed other Abrahamic interpretations of the scripture are just a little more honest in the fact Yahweh was initially one God of many*, and so were not as in need of an explanation to plaster over the polytheistic cracks, but I could be utterly misguided there. So far as the Christian perspective firmly involving the Trinity, though, some translations don't seem to want to leave anything to chance in interpreting that "us" (screenshot from "Bible Gateway.com"). *edit: that is to say, like, from a polytheist perspective the Yahwist faith being monotheist does not preclude Yahweh as an entity being real or true; it just means that the people willing to accept monotheism as a prerequisite to worship him according to his strictures have chosen to reject a "polytheistic" reality for a "monotheistic" one, analogous to a person believing say, their country's president is the only real power in the world. There is plenty of evidence for other world leaders existing or having existed at one time, but they no longer have anything to do with the person that believes in the power of their personal president alone, so forget 'em (or rewrite them into a single megapowerful Gigapresident, should you prefer). If you're okay with the other world leaders having existed historically at one point, it's not such a crisis if reference to one floats up now and again when looking at your very very old Books of the President. LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Jan 18, 2024 |
# ? Jan 18, 2024 15:47 |
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How can anyone become a trinitarian after reading the Bible?
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 16:12 |
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If only someone had written a book on the Trinity so you could find out.
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 16:26 |
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Gaius Marius posted:If only someone had written a book on the Trinity so you could find out.
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 17:11 |
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Divis Mal
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 17:29 |
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Groda posted:How can anyone become a trinitarian after reading the Bible? Not to be flippant or snide but read the Church Fathers since they developed the Trinitarian model and they were intimately familiar with the corpus of texts that would become the Bible and also were deeply embedded in Hellenized Judaism and Hellenic philosophy in general. In this context the Trinitarian model is the one that was found to be the most satisfying when trying to understand God as described by Jesus, Paul, the Hebrew Testament, contemporary Jewish traditions, neoplatonic philosophy, etc. They wrote quite extensively about how they came to this conclusion! It then became orthodoxy as the result of a long period of extensive and very heated discussion and which is also quite well-documented. It is also worth noting that scripture is not a scientific treatise and makes no claim to be one: in particular the idea that a Biblical passage must have a single, correct, unambiguous meaning is a very modern one and would not have been shared by the Church Fathers or early theologians (and this probably remains true well into the Middle Ages). Rather most Biblical texts would have been seen as having multiple meanings and multiple different but valid interpretations and no-one would have had any problem with this.
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 18:19 |
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There were creeds though you had to agree to or profess
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 18:21 |
A_Bluenoser posted:It is also worth noting that scripture is not a scientific treatise and makes no claim to be one: in particular the idea that a Biblical passage must have a single, correct, unambiguous meaning is a very modern one and would not have been shared by the Church Fathers or early theologians (and this probably remains true well into the Middle Ages). Rather most Biblical texts would have been seen as having multiple meanings and multiple different but valid interpretations and no-one would have had any problem with this. We may be seeing a large scale version of this in slow motion in reality!
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 18:27 |
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euphronius posted:There were creeds though you had to agree to or profess Yes, but they are developed as a summary of the decisions that were made during the afore mentioned process. They are an endpoint rather than a starting point and still leave a lot of room for interpretation.
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# ? Jan 18, 2024 18:28 |
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Frosted flake has some very good posts on the politics of early church dogmatism and orthodoxy you want to track them down. Maybe I will edit I found it. Too big to quote. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=4016635&pagenumber=2055&perpage=40#post533203617 euphronius fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jan 18, 2024 |
# ? Jan 18, 2024 18:28 |
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Relevant to recent discourse "Magic, Religion, Materiality," by Gustavo Benavides posted:Star Man, I have yet to come across anything else that looks like it would be of particular interest for you but I still intend to share if I do
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# ? Jan 19, 2024 02:31 |
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One thing my years of failing at comparative religion taught me was that fundamentalism, especially in the sense "what's in the text is 100% fact and right", is a very recent invention, and for most of the history of Christianity, people would be pretty baffled by modern fundamentalist interpretations.
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 18:18 |
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christian fundamentalism is younger than electric lighting
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 18:24 |
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Americanised Christianity is weird heretical confidence trickery pushed by law school flameouts and the like IMO As my buddy Julian would say - superstitio, not religio
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 18:34 |
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There's always been scriptural arguments floating around, but the development of printing and protestantism led to a lot of laymen interpreting the bible with their own understandings without being tempered and shaped by the formalized church's interpretation. Language is inherently ambiguous, and the bigger a work, the more different parts to focus on. America being built on religious freedom with a lot of weird dissidents to traditional orthodoxy really made room for weird stuff to bloom. I think Islam's tradition of arguing scripture might be older, but they have less formalized structure to express a thousand different sects. But fundamentalism is more than just creating a new understanding based on scripture; it's all about creating a whole fantasy of what history used to be and how there was a better time before long ago that we in our corrupt modern ways have drifted from because of awful decadent influences*, so we must return to those fantasy times by jumping through hoops to restore true morality, maybe larp a bit how you think that more moral society used to be and crack down on people who don't get with the program. *which the fantasy that times used to be better is wide-rangingly popular and has been around since the written word. Ancient Greeks talked about how they lived in the iron age, not because that was the type of tool they used, but because previous ages were silver and gold, and then the world became so dull and dreary. I think some cultures with the idea that the world was in a cycle of being destroyed and remade added in that this is the worst iteration of existence. I don't know if ancient groups ever got into fundamentalist larps, but it wouldn't surprise me.
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 19:24 |
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whig history predominates in times of plenty and peace, and the anti-whig history (not to be confused with non-whig history) predominates in times of chaos and war. just retrojection of present concerns into history
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 19:27 |
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bob dobbs is dead posted:christian fundamentalism is younger than electric lighting Not really The Puritans were the very definition of fundamentalists who did some pretty hard core things during the English Commonwealth. Banning Christmas as well as other feasts, imposing a strict set of worship practices, destroying church statues, white washing church walls or destroying religious murals, ripping out rood screens, effectively banning anything other than worship on Sunday, trying to ban sports and gambling etc. You can still see the effects of this time in English churches if you know what to look for. They were so bad that when Cromwell died the populace welcomed back the Stuart kings as monarchy was better than the Puritans. I'm sure people familiar with the history of the Catholic church could chime in with times when they went off the deep end as well.
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 19:51 |
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Truly the catholics were right to keep the Bible in a language that you wouldn't be able to read until you were far enough in your education to know some basic theology and understand how literature is structured
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 19:57 |
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For a lot of protestant flavours the problem with the Catholic church wasn't just the rampant monstrous corruption but more that they weren't fundamentalist enough. The corruption was just a good way of getting the peasants involved before introducing them to Christmas being evil because it's not in the Bible or everything anyone ever does being predetermined. Sorta like how cults like Scientology and Mormonism don't tell you any of the wacky sci-fi poo poo until you're already in too deep to back out.
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 20:13 |
SlothfulCobra posted:*which the fantasy that times used to be better is wide-rangingly popular and has been around since the written word. Ancient Greeks talked about how they lived in the iron age, not because that was the type of tool they used, but because previous ages were silver and gold, and then the world became so dull and dreary. I think some cultures with the idea that the world was in a cycle of being destroyed and remade added in that this is the worst iteration of existence. I don't know if ancient groups ever got into fundamentalist larps, but it wouldn't surprise me.
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 20:42 |
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maybe we can just have a general airing of grievances about eliade because this seems like it is feeling around the edges of that
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# ? Jan 21, 2024 23:43 |
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Nessus posted:"everything sucks now, unlike when I was young, when it was much better" is a universal human idea, I think, and the fact that literally ten seconds of thought will probably find glaring flaws in this assessment does not make it less tempting. The zeitgeist can be optimistic or pessimistic and while it is tempting to go through and cherrypick past times where people said "things are better than they were" or "things are worse than they were" and attempt to argue that people always skew one way or the other, it's also about as meaningful as cherrypicking people saying they had a hot winter in '56 to disprove global warming.
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# ? Jan 22, 2024 00:08 |
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bob dobbs is dead posted:that's my standard response nowadays to peeps needing a theodicy. "why does god let evil poo poo happen?" "god is basically a ball of every god the hebrews had. they had some trouble formally rolling in the apotropaic demons like pazuzu, who you made sacrifice to to avoid falling off of cliffs, avoid unwanted guests and anyone fuckin w pregnant women, and others like him" quote:Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?
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# ? Jan 22, 2024 01:18 |
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Foxtrot_13 posted:Not really I would push back against that characterisation on the basis of precision if nothing else. The term "fundamentalism" does not appear as a defined thing until the 1920s and it is largely a North American movement (at least to start with). If I recall properly the term actually originates with a series of pamphlets published in the 19teens called "The Fundamentals: a Testimony of Truth". We should be very cautious about backporting terms that develop in a specific context to earlier contexts or to different cultures because it can obscure what was actually going on and what people actually thought they were doing. It is the same problem as when people describe Medival peasant groups as "Marxist": that philosophy just does not exist in that context and trying to apply it ignores the very real (and often very well thought-out and sophisticated) concerns that the real historical people had and to be honest really devalues them. The Puritans in the 17th century certainly believed that Biblical scripture as they received it was the sole basis for correct religion and was completely "true" in some sense but they did not necessarily mean the same thing when they said that as someone would when they said it in the early 20th century. I don't think it is clear that there is any line to be drawn between Puritan iconoclasm and young earth creationism: they don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. This is getting rather beyond the topic of ancient history but I think it is important to remember that our current concepts don't necessarily map to what historical people were doing or thinking: just because thing X in history looks like modern thing Y to us on first glance does not necessarily mean they are actually similar or that the comparison is valid. Thanks for listening to my TED talk
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# ? Jan 22, 2024 01:41 |
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A_Bluenoser posted:I would push back against that characterisation on the basis of precision if nothing else. The term "fundamentalism" does not appear as a defined thing until the 1920s and it is largely a North American movement (at least to start with). If I recall properly the term actually originates with a series of pamphlets published in the 19teens called "The Fundamentals: a Testimony of Truth". We should be very cautious about backporting terms that develop in a specific context to earlier contexts or to different cultures because it can obscure what was actually going on and what people actually thought they were doing. It is the same problem as when people describe Medival peasant groups as "Marxist": that philosophy just does not exist in that context and trying to apply it ignores the very real (and often very well thought-out and sophisticated) concerns that the real historical people had and to be honest really devalues them. My child, this is a confessional.
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# ? Jan 22, 2024 10:54 |
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A_Bluenoser posted:I would push back against that characterisation on the basis of precision if nothing else. The term "fundamentalism" does not appear as a defined thing until the 1920s and it is largely a North American movement (at least to start with).
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# ? Jan 22, 2024 17:08 |
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You might say the 1st c. Christians were somewhat fundamentalist
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# ? Jan 22, 2024 19:39 |
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My fundament is on the a list
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# ? Jan 22, 2024 23:29 |
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It's a fundament
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# ? Jan 23, 2024 00:49 |
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more like funda-mentally ill! am I right fellas?
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# ? Jan 23, 2024 00:51 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 11:52 |
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Okay Star Man, what do you think about this one? Astral Magic in Babylonia Astral Magic in Babylonia, Erica Reiner 1995: Introduction posted:
Is this the astroarchaeology you're hoping for? I only read the introduction but it seems like the opposite of whatever that first book was edit: okay, I read the whole thing last night; it was less about development of stellar Deities and their mythology and more a collection of documentation of the ways Akkadian and Sumerian magicians and witches would invoke various Deities who were associated with specific stars or constellations for magical purpose, and how this eventually laid the groundwork for the development of Hellenistic astrology. So it's not 100% slam dunk something you will find interesting, but as someone who calls herself "LITERALLY A BIRD" who often finds things laterally related to ornithology interesting, so you might find pieces of particularly enjoyable information in there. I learned that Venus, as a specific stellar Deity, was considered to have comparable significance to the Sun and the Moon, that was neat to me. LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Jan 23, 2024 |
# ? Jan 23, 2024 01:32 |